Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is the principal pension scheme provided by Universities, Higher Education and other associated institutions for their employees.
The company approached Studiowide with a design brief for an upcoming campaign, aimed at highlighting the importance of Information Security to employees within their business.
The purpose of the campaign is to raise awareness of the risks associated with the potential mishandling of important company information. USS requested a 6 poster campaign, including a 16-page booklet – used to support the communication in each of the posters.
Challenges
The first engagement for us on any campaign of this nature is to conduct a strategy review meeting with the client. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the brief and to brainstorm initial ideas. Following this meeting, we submitted two strong concepts. Of the two ideas we put forward, the ‘Make Information Security a Reality’ concept was chosen.
The idea behind our ‘Make Information Security a Reality’ concept is that the campaign features a non-conforming cartoon world – a cartoon world that lives outside of ‘reality’. In the non-conforming cartoon world, characters (wrongly) choose whether or not to conform to any information security policies (they don’t have to conform because the cartoon characters and scenes are not ‘real’ – they perceive there is no ‘real’ risk).
We knew the themes and messages we needed to get across, but what we didn’t have was the creative skills to design a campaign that would convey these messages.
Solution
We then highlighted across all 6 posters: as a result of this non-conformance or neglect of data, there are a number of ‘incidents’ which occur, due to data/information being carelessly abandoned or left unguarded (in the non-conforming cartoon world).
The real world images are used to highlight the ‘reality and risk’ and the consequences of what can happen as a result of a security breach when data has been obtained, stumbled upon, stolen etc.
The campaign message is translated across all of the security themes. Each poster depicts a different scene and a different risk. To illustrate each scenario we manipulated a number of photo images and placed these into a cartoon environment. The final composition of illustration and imagery make up a scenario which is aligned with each security topic.
Our inspiration for this style is the inverse of Roger Rabbit: instead of a cartoon character in the real world, we are working with real characters in a cartoon world.
Results
The Information Security booklet and poster campaign was produced within 4 weeks. The client is very pleased both with the overall creative concept and the final design pieces that we have submitted.
“We commissioned Studiowide to help design and produce a series of posters to highlight the key risks in relation to information security and to support this with a pocket guide for staff summarising some of the key messages.
We knew the themes and messages we needed to get across, but what we didn’t have was the creative skills to design a campaign that would convey these messages in the most effective way. The staff at Studiowide were always approachable and would listen to our ideas, but more importantly, they brought their own ideas to the table, using their experience and creative skills to help produce an original theme for the campaign.
This was the first time we had launched an internal campaign like this and a key consideration was always going to be timeframes and costs, to this end Studiowide were very professional and where possible worked to our schedule, they were also very clear about costs and any decisions which could of impacted costs were always discussed with us up front.
The effectiveness of the campaign will only tell over time, but early feedback from those staff who have received the booklet has been very positive with staff reporting that the key messages have been achieved.
We believe that with the excellent work from Studiowide and the quality and clarity of the final material they have produced for us we have given ourselves the very best chance of achieving the goals of our campaign. I would not hesitate to use them again and would certainly recommend them to other organisations”. Robert Lee, Data Manager, USS Ltd. Liverpool.
